THE CRITICS Jon Bailes, Milford Coppock, Malindy Hetfeld, Luke Kemp, Jess Kinghorn, Miriam McDonald, Chris Schilling, Abbie Stone, Oscar Taylor-Kent, Justin Towell, Rachel Watts, Alan Wen, Dashiell Wood, and… you!
BEST PIRATE GAME THAT ACTUALLY MANAGED TO COME OUT
SHADOW GAMBIT: THE CURSED CREW
FORMAT PS5, PS4 / PUB MIMIMI GAMESDEV MIMIMI GAMES
We were starting to think we had more chance of seeing an actual ghost than of seeing Ubisoft’s Skull And Bones on our PS5 (a release date was announced as we worked on this issue). Luckily, this was still an excellent year for videogame piracy, courtesy of this spooky, stealthy treat. Shadow Gambit takes everything that was marvellous about Desperados 3 and makes it even better, thanks to a cast of delightful spirits with some of the best powers we got to play with in 2023. Why settle for a cannon on a ship when one of your crew carries a cannon on their back? And why settle for a regular ship when you can have the Red Marley, with its own soul? This stealth game throws an overwhelming number of guards at you then lets you pick them off with your increasingly OP pirates one by one. Arrrsome.
SLICKEST ACTION
NEON WHITE
FORMAT PS5, PS4 / PUB ANNAPURNA INTERACTIVE / DEV ANGEL MATRIX
Blending genres as it does, Neon White can sound complicated when someone describes it to you. It’s a platformer FPS where you have to carefully manage your guns, which are also cards, and can be fired regularly as well as discarded for a secondary effect (such as a super jump). The beauty comes not only in the balletic way these systems can come
